Paris Salons catalogues

Paris
salons

Honoré Daumier 'Free day at the Salon' From the series "Le Public du Salon," published in Le Charivari (May 17, 1852) p10

Salon is the name given to the official exhibition of members’ work of the French Academy, the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. The Academy was founded in 1648, and its statues of 1663 also required academicians to submit work for an annual public exhibition of painting and sculpture.

The first exhibition took place in 1664 and again in 1665, but the difficulties in organising an annual exhibition resulted in the regulations being changed to allow for a biennial exhibition. In 1673 the exhibition was held in the arcades of the Palais Royal and lasted for several weeks. After a hiatus of 25 years, the exhibition was re-established in 1699 and held in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre. After exhibitions in 1704 and 1725, the Salon was properly revived in 1737, in response to the success of the Exposition de jeunesse in the Place Dauphine.1

The jury system of selection was introduced in 1748. As these were the only public exhibitions in Paris, the official academic art obtained a stranglehold on publicity, and in the 19th century a number of rival Salons were organised by progressive artists.

On 17 January 1881 Edmond Turquet, Under Secretary of State for the Fine Arts, announced the government’s decision to withdrew official sponsorship from the Salon, and a group of artists organised the Société des artistes français to take responsibility for the show, while the State reserved the right to hold long interval exhibitions of the best of French art. In 1883 the government organised the Exposition nationale triennale for from September 15 to October 31, 1883. Then Turquet, having returned to power as part of the new ministry of René Goblet, indefinitely postponed the1886 Triennale, and when he announced this at the awards ceremony of the 1885 annual Salon he was greeted by thunderous applause, thereby ending the chapter in the Official Salon.

A listing of catalogues held in the National Gallery of Australia Research
Library

1882–1892 Exposition des arts incoherents was organised in Paris as a mockery of the 'official' Salon. It had
illustrated catalogues which parodied the official 'Salon illustré'.

1884 Salon des Indépendants.

1890 Société nationale des beaux-arts starts organising an annual exhibition, called Exposition de ...
The year 1899 appears to be the first time the society refers to its exhibitions in their catalogues as a 'salon'
rather than 'Exposition'. It is sometimes referred to as 'Salon de la nationale' or 'Salon du Champs de mars'.3

1892–1897 Salon de la Rose + Croix

1895–1896 Salon de l'art nouveau, first and second salons.

1903 Salon d'automne, organised by the Société du Salon d'automne.

1919 'En 1919 Artistes français et Nationale se regroupent, puis ouvrent une section à la Société des beaux-arts
de la France d'outre-mer'.4 However according to the catalogues themselves, the societies only appear
to start regrouping in 1940, certainly in the late 1920s and the 1930s they are still separately named and
separately exhibiting (although in 1937 they exhibited jointly). The 'd'outre mer' seems to first appear in 1946.

1940 Société des artistes français and Société nationale des beaux-arts start jointly exhibiting, and the names
seem to evolve every few years.

1946 Salon des Réaliés nouvelles. French exhibition venue founded in Paris in 1946, named after the exhibition of
abstract art organized by Fredo Sides in Paris in 1939 at the Galerie Charpentier.

The Salons of the Société des artistes français and the Société nationale des beaux-arts can have Catalogues and Catalogues illustrés. However there are also the Livret illustré du Salon by Ch. De Mourgues (which we hold 1882) which is different to the Catalogue illustré du Salonpublished under the direction of FG Dumas.

Also there was a precursor to the Société nationale des beaux-arts of the same name, that was established in the 1860s.

Formats

The National Gallery of Australia Research Library has quite extensive holdings in various formats. Chadwyck-Healey and Knoedler (Group 1) both did extensive republications on microfiche. In addition, we have microfilm copies of Salon d'automne. There are also Garland reprints. The publishing house Echelle de Jacob is also republishing the salons catalogues in hard copy, with cumulative indexes at the back. Many of our Salons are catalogued as Rare Books because of the fragile nature of the bindings and paper.

Exclusions and scope of list

The chronological listing only includes Paris exhibitions which include the word 'salon' except for the Société nationale des beaux-arts exhibitions prior to 1899, and the expositions of the Société des artistes indépendants.

Paris Salons – tips & suggestions
for usage in National Gallery of Australia

Information in this index regarding the entries for the Chadwyck-Healey and Knoedler fiches was taken from the Chadwyck-Healey and Knoedler published lists. Frequently it will not match the eyeball header. For example – even if this index cites the item as 'Société des artistes français' frequently this information is not on the eyeball header of the fiche, which instead will give the year and the exhibition venue. This can make the Knoedler fiche particularly difficult to find as they do not have numbers but are filed in the National Gallery of Australia Research Library according to the arrangement in the Knoedler List.

A further complication can be that the organising body might not actually be named on the reproduced catalogue. This confusion is most likely with the Société des artistes français and the Société nationale des beaux-arts. If this is the case, look at the title frame of the other Salon for the same year and you will be able to work out which one is which. There are errors in the Chadwyck-Healey and Knoedler lists and it is definitely a good idea to double check the item against the title frame rather than relying on the eyeball fiche header.

The eyeball fiche header can be wrong –- for example the Chadwyck Healey Salon de 'art nouveau, première catalogue gives a date of 1986 on the eyeball header, while this date is nowhere on the actual fiche and the item is in fact identical to a Garland reprint which lists this catalogue as 1895. Although anomalies when discovered have been corrected, it has not been possible to check the thousand of fiches that the Gallery holds.

If using the microfiche
in the National Gallery of Australia Research Library always place a marker
at the spot from which you took the fiche in the microfiche cabinet. Do
not refile microfiche – please give to the Reference Librarian to refile.

Do not rely on the indexes at the front of the Salons about which artist exhibited at that Salon – they are very untrustworthy. The listings by Sanchez, Dugnait, Heim and Guiffrey are much better, however as yet they do not cover the complete range of years.5

Arrangement of
Salons

Often the Salons are arranged by media, and the indexes of the exhibiting artists are usually arranged by media as well. In addition the Société des artistes français tends to break its artists up between 'francais' and 'etranger'. The indexes within the salon catalogues themselves are unreliable – they are not a complete list of the artists exhibiting in the Salon. If you are working with a 'Catalogue illustre' you cannot assume that the index covers all the artists that exhibited that year – and certainly not every artist is illustrated. In some years various publishers issued different versions of the illustrated catalogue. Some years there will also be an 'Annex' to the catalogue.

Author: Mainardi, Patricia
Title: The end of the Salon :art and the state in the early Third Republic / Patricia Mainardi
Imprint: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1993
Desc: xii, 210 p. : ill ; 26 cm.
System #: 000652656
Held at: National Gallery of Australia - Library - N6850.M35

1881 Société des artistes français. Illustrated catalogue of the Paris Salon / edited by F.G. Dumas.
New York : J.W. Bouton, 1881. At head of title: Third year. Note: Only has an English title page,
the rest of the volume appears to be the original French version. RB Parkes

1 Reference sources differ as to when the first exhibitions occurred. The dates and history given here are from The Dictionary of art London: Macmillan, 1996. However other sources state that the first exhibition was in 1667, and exhibitions were then held annually until 1737, when then became biennial to the Revolution, and then returned to annual.

3 There is however some confusion in the reference tools as to when this society was first formed. Some works claim it was founded in 1890 by Puvis de Chavannes, Carrière and Rodin together with others who seceded from the official Salon. Another reference works states: 'In 1889, following the International Exhibition of that year, a schism took place and the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts was founded. This, from 1880 [sic] onwards, held an annual exhibition'. Another French reference tool states 'Une scission en 1889, donna naissance à la Société nationale des beaux-arts'. However the 1890 date appears to be the most supported, and is the date quoted by Mainardi, Patricia. The end of the Salon : art and the French State in the early Third Republic. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 86.

A Garland reprint (National fine art exhibitions, Société nationale des beaux arts, Catalogue. N 5064 .N37) however causes much confusion as it gives a facsimile reprint of a catalogue of the Society with an 1834 publication date on the title page, with internal evidence to suggest a publication date of 1864, and a founding date of the Society of 1862. The contradictory information is repeated on the verso in the Library of Congress CIP, though the contents page of the Catalogue states it is: Société nationale des beaux-arts, catalogue, February 1864, copy from the Bibliothèque Nationale. One can only conclude that this body was a precursor to the later body of the same name.